Below zero outside, ice on the windows, and the seed catalogs begin to drift up on the kitchen table at this time of year. We are trying more and more to chose varieties based on their history and adaptations to our region, and looking forward to saving and sharing more seeds with growers and farmers nearby. Along the way, we are finding, learning, and honoring the personal and close to home stories the seeds can hold.

Someone asked recently if we'd started planning our growing space and crops for next year. I had to smile--in some ways our crop planning is never-ending. Even in the earliest spring plantings there's the dialog of next year. As in next year, we'll order the larger pack of carrots seeds, or next year we don't need to plant nearly so many cabbage starts. It continues through the growing season, each year's garden a working draft full of editing and revision. And so we make notes: delete the "calliope mix" of carrots (beautiful multicolored carrot bunches don't outweigh the fact that they are less flavorful than the orange, and those white ones are ghostly anemic little vegetables, with a tendency to bolt and go to seed rather than making a root); add some melons started indoors; move the clover seeded under the squash to a week later in the season. The summer and the fall harvest seasons are full of notes in the margins, ideas for improving. We never really stop planning.

At this point in the season we are still processing many of those notes--both mental and recorded--about what to do next year. At the same time, we are revisioning at a larger scale as we shift from growing just for ourselves to growing for sale as well. And right in the middle of that process, the seed catalogs are starting to arrive. I have spent a few of our sub-zero mornings lately with a cup of coffee and a seed catalog (or several) in front of the full-spectrum light (the seedlings and chickens aren't the only ones who benefit from a little supplemental lighting here).

Those seed catalogs, with their color photos, illustrations, and descriptions, are quite seductive. I've always been one to fall for heirloom varietites with a good story or an interesting name. And here's where I confess to having recklessly planted four different kinds of dry corn this year. Two did spectacularly well (the Seneca Red Stalker and Mandan Bride), they all did a little bit of crossing with the sweet corn (just a few kernels here and there), but the Oaxacan Green Dent corn failed rather miserably. I have been to Oaxaca, and I know full well the climate is quite different than Montana, but....I couldn't resist the image of green corn tamales.

That's the beauty and danger of heirloom seed catalogs like the Seed Saver's Exchange: you can get caught up in the story and forget one of the key values of heirloom seeds: finding one that is right for your area. While an emphasis of the land grant universities in each state used to include development of regionally adapted seeds, much of that specific local adaptation has been lost, and many seed varieties are sold across the country with little specificity. Many are widely adapated enough to work most places, with a bit of care and protection. Some are specifically touted for a feature like maturing quickly, that can provide advatages in any short-season location, whether it's Vermont or Wyoming. But there's more to local conditions than just what USDA zone you are growing in.

I have worked on research projects examining how much local adapatation there can be in species of wild plants that have a large geographic range. I know there is a keen value in using seeds that come from plants surviving for generations in the region. And so this year, in my garden planning, I'm making a renewed effort to chose varieties with a story special to here.

So I find myself looking through the dry bean descriptions and underlining those that were originally found or defined in the nearby states, and deciding to perhaps pass up the ones from Alabama even if their flavor and colors sound delightful. I am hoping we can get back to visit someone in the Bitterroot again who fed us a wonderful soup from homegrown beans (and wishing I'd been bold enough to ask for some seeds at that lunch).

Luckily, trying to find locally adapted seeds doesn't need to mean any sort of compromise on having a plant with a good story. In fact, it can just get better. In the corn patch for example, as much as I loved the purple husks of the Seneca Red Stalker, I think I know what next year's dry corn will be: the Painted Mountain Corn whose development specifically for our cold dry region has been a work of passion of Dave Christensen. Over the summer we've spoken with more and more neighbors who grow it sucessfully here. And the garden romantic in me can pass up the temptation of the "Black Aztec" a little easier knowing that this variety has stories from indigenous corns throughout the west, but also from right here, next door.

I'm beginning to understand that the best story isn't in the 80-word description in the catalog mailed from Vermont or Maine or Oregon, but the ones you watch unfold, attach to the plant, and keep on telling. This is the variety of corn that was developed for our area's climate. But more than that, it's the corn in the final beautiful pages of our friend Cedar's first book of poetry, a poem dedicated to her husband Mark. It's the corn that was scattered in the cottonwood grove this summer as a part of their wedding ceremony, and the corn they arranged in sunset-colored mandalas and photographed last fall. It's the corn that encompasses their own story of courtship and gardens and growth, like the Delicata squash are for us.

Of course, not everyone has a household of poetic gardeners next door, but there are ways to seek out seeds developed in, grown in, or originating from your region, ready to take on some of your own story too.

This image, from one of our harvest baskets this summer, shows the riches of our food production - and some of our core staples: an under layer of fingerling potatoes, dry beans, and eggs from the laying hens. On a night like tonight, when we are still buttoning down our farm and getting ready for winter, this food sustains us.

I was skeptical of spaghetti squash at first. We grew them in our garden mostly for the landowner, but have had such a harvest I've simply had to come to terms with them. I had always been displeased with them in the past, I think because I was expecting them to be...well, squash. Or to be pasta. Truth is, they are not quite either of those foods but once I learned to stop expecting them to be something they are not, things have worked out well.

And so I offer you a convert's guide to spaghetti squash, the vegetable-based pseudo-noodle that serves as an excellent vehicle for pesto and other pasta sauces.

For me, the key to getting nicely noodley spaghetti squash has been to bake and fluff them with a little bit of oil or butter, to help the strands separate. So, start off with your oblong squash, cut it in half lengthwise and scoop out the seeds so you have two long oval bowls. Drop a dab of butter or a splash of olive oil into each half, put them on a baking dish or tray, and pop them in the oven at 350. Bake for about 40 minutes. Baking them face-down can preserve a bit more moisture, which helps separate the strands. I usually forget this fact until after baking, but it still works out

When the inside flesh seems soft (i.e., easy to stick a fork into), pull them out of the oven and prepare for the magical step that turns a baked squash into a bowl of pseudo-noodles. Drop a big spoonful of pesto into the squash cavity and spread it around. Then, simply take a fork and gently rake along the cavity of the squash, pulling the strands gently away from the edges, and fluffing them up. The pesto will start to mix in without much effort.

You should be accumulating a nice pile of fluffed up "noodles" in your squash at this point; continue the process till you've pulled all the flesh away from the rind. Then, stir in additional pesto till you reach your desired level of sauciness.

Now, you should have a nice little self-contained squash rind noodle bowl. You could eat it right now if you want, but if you have a little more patience it will get even better. Take those noodle bowls, top with cheese, and stick them back in the oven. Keep an eye on them, as this stage is short: 10 minutes or less. Once the cheese is melted and bubbling slightly on the top, pull them out and serve.

If you get some smaller squashes, they make great self-contained individual-sized bowls; a family or other group of picky eaters could even customize the type or amount of sauce, cheese, or other toppings, so everyone gets their preferred style. This is also a great way to enjoy traditionally pasta-associated sauces for people avoiding grains.

We have also done these twice-baked squash with tomato based sauces, or with butter and cheese for an almost mac-and-cheese version. All are delicious.

Let's be honest: we don’t get out to the movies much. We are the exact wrong people to give you any recommendation of the latest releases at your local theater. But recently we've come across and enjoyed a few films on farming, food, and social justice that seemed so relevant, thought-provoking, and compelling, that we wanted to share them with you. Our first film review covers a Magnolia Pictures documentary on hunger in the US.

We saw A Place at the Table when it showed as part of the Peace and Justice Film Series at the University of Montana. The film examines the issue of hunger, specifically child hunger, in the United States, where one in four children experiences food insecurity at some point in their life.

The storytelling is good, offering a mix of compelling experts in the legal, policy, and health issues surrounding child hunger but anchoring the narrative firmly in the first-hand experience of several families, in both urban and rural settings across the US.

One of the key issues the film illustrates very well is that childhood hunger and obesity are not problems on opposite ends of a spectrum, but are in fact intricately linked. It is possible for a child to be both hungry (as in not knowing when or what the next meal might be) and obese. One mother, whose diabetic second-grade daughter illustrates the trend of the development of health problems in younger and younger children, talks about her challenge of trying to stretch dollars by buying the cheapest available foods available in her local stores--which are generally highly processed and less healthy. The girl answers the school health worker's questions about what she will eat when she goes home after school with a single word: chips.

Another eye-opening point in the film was that agricultural subsidies in the US go overwhelmingly to crops that are the main components of highly processed foods. Vegetables and fruits represent a tiny sliver of the agricultural subsidies to farmers. This is reflected in the availability of healthy foods in some geographic areas; both of the urban families discuss how far they have to go to reach a fully stocked grocery store, or find any basic foods like whole fruits and vegetables. The camera follows one mother on a three-bus, one-hour journey one way to the nearest grocery store.

This is one of those films--the best sort, really--that leaves one asking "well, what can I do?" I cringed at the well-meaning enthusiastic student coordinators of the film series who stood up after the showing, thanked everyone for coming, and asked for donations that would go to a Kiva account "to fund projects, like farming and food projects all over the world." Though I understand the good intention, it seemed almost as though they had missed several key points of the film: that hunger is not just a problem in other parts of the world, but a fundamental threat to the health and productivity of the United States, as well.

Like most real issues, there is not a simple answer to "what can we do?" Certainly, giving to or volunteering at a food bank helps, in the short term. Establishing community gardens in food-desert neighborhoods, or working to help schools incorporate fresh local farm products or simply acquaint kids with healthy whole foods, are all wonderful. The odds are high that an organization near you can provide that opportunity.

But we can't let ourselves off the hook with a $10 donation to the local food bank; when we dig in it's clear that the root causes are grittier, less charming, and harder to tackle. Measures like private charity programs and government food assistance, which were intended as short-term stopgap measures, have become long-term projects that are not an effective way to accomplish the goal of food security. Poverty and government agriculture and food policies do not make for such satisfying volunteer opportunities. But I'd encourage you to watch the film, think about the message, and look for ways to keep that in mind in your own actions, votes, and conversations. As the film explains, hunger in the US should be seen as an issue of national security: when the children who could or should be the future leaders of science, engineering, military, and education, are unable to focus in school and chronically underperform because of their hunger, we are not setting ourselves to live up to full potential as communities or a nation.

Max Smith proudly plucks a turkey that will become part of a Thanksgiving share for supporters. Proceeds will help pay off farming loans and be reinvested in infrastructure for the next season.

Two weeks before Thanksgiving this year, we got a message from our friend Max Smith. Max, like many others, is just starting out into full time farming. We first this soon-to-be-friend in the middle of last winter at a dinner hosted at his mom's house. He hosted several of those winter dinners to pitch of his idea of starting a CSA he calls the Missoula Grain and Vegetable Company to potential CSA share-holders, the combination of nerves, excitement, and enthusiasm barely contained in his rail-thin frame.

We were busy starting our own farming operations then, and we decided we couldn't afford the $300 membership-- we were busy with our own investment of seeds, irrigation equipment and fencing and hoped to be successfully growing our own vegetables and grains, anyway. However, over the course of the summer, we developed a certain feeling of kinship with Max as rumors began to float down the valley about this young farmer who was growing an acre of carrots, living in a tipi with three farmhands, and, like us, going through growing pains. In May he offered us some of his young quinoa plants as part of a trial program. We took him up on the offer, and then, late one night when we happened upon him at one of the local dumpsters we frequent to pick up organic food waste for our chickens and compost, we had a long conversation that sealed our friendship. Despite a long list of challenges, including the departure of most of his help to return to school and teaching, Max was glowing with enthusiasm from his first year of really trying it out on his own. He grinned and held out his forearms to show how a season of weeding and pulling carrots had built new muscles, so much so that his right arm was larger than his left.

When we found out a few weeks ago he was offering turkeys for this Thanksgiving to help fund his turkey flock for next year, including an expensive but necessary incubator for eggs, we jumped at the chance to help him. Max is a growing number of beginning farmer friends we have who seem to have a deep intense need to farm, as part of their role in the world. We admire them, working to grow food against tough odds.

Our $90 Thanksgiving share included potatoes, onions, squash, garlic and carrots in addition to the turkey to make our Thanksgiving dinner complete. Of course we could have found a cheaper meal option--even sticking with organically grown foods with a larger travel distance, we could probably have found a better deal. But it's an investment in future potential, as well. Max took out a $28,500 loan to help bankroll his efforts this first year, and the late fall shares were an important part of managing to pay that FSA loan back within the first year. With less than 70,000 farmers in the US under the age of 35 - or well less than one percent of the US population, we all need to do our part to help support beginning farmers.

Things will be quiet here in this blog space this week. Many of our recent days have been filled to overflow with the farmland search and re-search, and the next few will bring an even more intense digging in.

Later in the week we'll retreat to a family Thanksgiving in Oregon, the car loaded with winter squash, potatoes, and a turkey from a young Missoula farmer.

While we are away, we wish you days of safe travel, gratitude, good food, and warmth. We'll return next week with more images and stories.

Worldwide, agriculture is where the most child laborers can be found. The FAO estimates as many as 129 million girls and boys help produce some of the products we consume. This image was captured in Madagascar, in a lowland data rice and sugar cane plot. Later that day, I interviewed a young boy clearing a plot for a vanilla plantation.

Squash, corn, and beans are among the staples of indigenous agriculture in the Americas. In some places the tradition of growing them all three together in a polyculture led to the trio being known as the three sisters. We grew the three crops in separate portions of our garden this summer, but they all ended up together at the table this week in a single dish we now refer to as the three sisters quesadilla.

This dinner stemmed from two inspirations: a half-gallon of pre-cooked squash stored in the fridge and needing to be used up, and memories of black-bean and sweet potato burritos we've loved (sweet potatoes don't really grow here, so we haven't had those in a while). This is probably a good place to admit that this, like many meals we feature, did not begin as a grand pre-planned vision. It grew organically and unexpectedly out of what was on hand at the time. Sticking as much as possible to food you grow can force some creativity. That creativity can lead to brilliant discoveries or, well, less than ideal combinations. Sometimes popcorn is dinner.

For today, though, we'll stick with another success. As usual I'll give you not so much a recipe as a set of directions. And not the GPS or google-maps kind of directions, but "turn left at the red barn, swing right around the stump, and keep on going till the bottom of the hill" kind of directions. Don't worry, you'll get close enough.

Three Sisters Quesadillas:

First, ideally a day or two ahead of time, bake far more squash than you can eat. Scoop the leftover squash out of the rind, puree or mash it, and store it in the fridge trusting that you'll think of something.

Next, start some black beans soaking the morning of your intended dinner. Convince yourself there is some sort of burrito-like plan for them and trust that it will come together by evening. Before going out to feed the sheep, set the beans on the stove and simmer them for an hour or more (unless you, perhaps, have not blown the seal on your pressure cooker, in which case you can cook your beans much more quickly and feed the animals whenever is convenient).

About the time you start to get really hungry, decide the squash and the beans will go together quite well, and formulate a burrito plan (because there are still tortillas in the fridge, right?). Sautee a chopped onion, a few red-ripe jalapenos or other good pepper, and a big handful of garlic cloves. Add them to the simmering beans along with a little cumin, salt and pepper. Let all of them simmer till they are a good soft texture, adding more water as necessary.

Pull out the bag of store-bought tortillas, and now.....choose your own adventure: are you lucky, and they are still good? Great, proceed to the last paragraph and save yourself some serious kitchen chaos. No, you see furry spots? Sounds familiar. Feed those to the chickens and keep reading. You're going to need to make some tortillas from scratch.

Montana cornflour tortillas (in no way traditional, but they worked): take two large handfuls of kernels rubbed off of the dry flint corn hanging in all corners of the house. Run them through the grain attachment on the Champion juicer, and discover with great joy that they make a nice fine corn flour. Mix your two large handfulls of corn flour with one handful of wheat flour (ok, sure, you can use cups if that works better for you). Add a half-teaspoon or so of salt and a generous slosh of oil (or a quarter cup, if you like). Stir the oil in with a fork, then use your hands to rub it into the flour. At this point the mix should seem dry still, but hold together a bit if you squeeze a handful. Add just enough warm water to make a firm dough. Roll and pat that out into shapes as close to circular as possible, and as thin as you can get without breaking. Cook them on a flat hot skillet, flipping twice, till slightly browned on each side. Stack them up as they cook and keep covered with a cloth, so they stay warm and flexible.

On each tortilla, spread a layer of the squash puree onto one half of the circle, and spoon a layer of black beans, then a layer of grated cheese. Fold the other half of the tortilla over to enclose the filling, and cook on a griddle untill the cheese is melted and the tortillas match your desired level of toastiness. Top with salsa, and perhaps the very last of the garden-grown red tomatoes. Enjoy.

An old streambank on the Antelope Springs Ranch reveals the soil profile and how deep roots can penetrate, even though layers of tough, degraded soils. Soil is the most valuable asset on this ranch, so they work to rebuild soil health.

We spent yesterday afternoon in a sterile hotel meeting hall with probably 200 other farmers and ranchers of all ages and styles brought together by the Natural Resources Conservation Service. We were greeted in the lobby by hotel staff who recognized what we must be there for and pointed down the hall with a smile "The dirt people are that way." We were attending a Soil Health Workshop, which sound dry at first but included such great presenters and insipiring information that we sometimes found ourselves engaged in almost a religious call-and-response fervor. Here are just a few of the highlights from the presentations:

Every farmer has livestock. Even if you just grow vegetables, you have livestock.

— Jon Sitka, NRCS Soil Scientist

This is the "underground herd" responsible for 90% of the functions we expect out of soil. Jon Sitka started his talk by holding up a small fist-sized aggregate (clump) of soil, and pointing out that it housed at least 7.5 billion microorganisms--a population in that handful of soil equal to the number of people on earth. These micro-livestock need careful tending, feeding, and care in order for the soil to function at its best. Just as ranchers who doesn't feed or shelter their aboveground cattle will lose profits and potential, anyone trying to grow crops from the soil will lose out if they don't properly care for that underground herd.

 We are creating our own droughts.

— Jon Sitka, NRCS Soil Scientist

By repeatedly taking too much plant material from aboveground, and not giving plants time to recover fully and regrow root systems, the water holding capacity of the soil is reduced, compounding problems from low rainfall years. Healthy soils can buffer those times of low rainfall by holding on to the water for longer.

Lotta dollars of fertilizer coming out of the back end of that cow. Now, do you want that all piled up in one place or spread out?

— Doug Peterson, NRCS Pasture Grazing Specialist and Rancher

The second presentation, from Doug Peterson, was about how to use high-intensity, short-duration grazing methods, such as "mob grazing" to manage pasture or range specifically to build soils. Local producers from Western Montana spoke to the audience about their successes and soil improvements from following these methods on parcels ranging from 30 or 40 to 300 acres, but it can apply at many scales. Noah is working with and documenting practices of ranchers who are applying these same tools and principles to restore soil over 50,000 acre spreads in Eastern Montana. We're excited to see how, with some work and creativity, we might do the same on a humble ten or so acres.

I have one sharp memory of harvesting and winnowing dry beans as a young child in the family garden, perhaps becuse the process involved jumping and stomping on a truckbed full of dry pods on a chilly fall day. Most years, though, our family garden did not include dry beans, and this year was the first I've grown them myself.

Once we decided to include dry beans in the garden, it took considerable restraint to limit ourselves to 4 or 5 varieties. Heirloom beans are one of those crops with a diversity of colors and patterns that draws me in to a point perhaps beyond reason; the flavor descriptions only furthered the obsession. I poured over the bean section of the seed catalog and found myself wanting to collect these varieties the way birders accumulate species on their life lists. And yet, this was new to me, the first time I'd planted them in a garden of my own. Most backyard growers I know don't bother with dry beans. We've been missing out.

A double handful of Black Turtle Beans, and two stray Jacob's Cattle Beans, straight from the garden.

Dry beans are one of those crops that often cause people to ask "is that really worth growing yourself?" It's a question worth asking. Buying enough fresh basil to make our year's worth of pesto would be drastically expensive, so certain crops like that make clear economic sense. Cooking beans, on the other hand, are already one of the most affordable foods available, especially in bulk. If you credit any sort of value to your time, you probably aren't going to put away much savings by growing your own black beans. But of course that isn't the only reason we plant.

One of our goals this year has been to go beyond just vegetable-growing, to really think about and learn what it takes to feed ourselves completely, to grow the staple calorie and protein crops that provide the base of the diet. When we think about the feasibility of feeding the world--filling the billions of bellies--these kinds of crops seem important to know and understand.

This is a food you can raise yourself and easily eat throughout the year, without any special means of putting-up. No canning, freezing, or special dehydrating needed. Once they dry on the vine, it's actually quite quick to crush the pods and blow the peices off the top of the heavier beans. Or you can sit around and shell them by hand if you happen to be having a long conversation with a neighbor who also isn't used to sitting with hands still. Now we have quart jars filled on the shelf for winter, and another box of dry pods that can just wait till we have time for it. In the end, these were one of our easiest crops.

They were remarkably simple to grow, essentially taking care of themselves after initial planting and a few passes of weeding and mulch. By mid-summer they were a thick jungle of leaves well capable of holding out against any weeds--almost impossible to walk through, but that was fine since they didn't really need any attention again till fall, when we collected dry pods from the frost-killed vines.

The beans pictured here, and appearing most frequently on our table lately, are the Black Turtle Beans, grown from seeds from the High Mowing catalog. They are the most-mainstream of the bean varieties we grew, in part because black beans are our favorite bean for burritos, a frequent food on our table. I was skeptical of whether there would be much taste difference between our home-grown and store-bought black beans. It's not the level of difference that we notice between purchased and home-grown tomatoes, but it's there. The beans cook more quickly (probably because they did not get an additional heated drying period on a warehouse after harvesting), and we think they do have a richer, deeper flavor. Though they'd be cheap to buy, growing them ourselves was well worth it.

I first got the idea of raising sheep from ranchers I worked with in Eastern Montana last winter and spring on a photography assignment. I started to learn then to see the land differently. I noticed things that had been background before, like the cairns that served as markers for shepherds across landscapes spanning tens of thousands of acres. The cairns grew larger when the places were active, with shepherds adding courses of stone. The current ranchers there showed me how the grasslands could be built up too, layer after layer, year after year, if managed well.

The building up, instead of wearing down, is the key. Whether it's management of grazing lands or of our own energy, we are constantly seeking that right balance point and adjusting the plans. We face tough issues, like many sheepherders before us, but the challenges of neighboring, searching for good land, and learning how to give our livestock the best forage as possible, has been both a joy and a tremendous responsibility.

These sheep are one more way that we have been slowly, at times painfully, learning to live off the land and our harvests: our produce, our meat. We work with what we have, and in the silent times when we don't know what to do, we take comfort in foraging for our animals, dreaming, in the openness of how we'll build community, the internal cairns we'll place, and build upon, layer upon layer.

Images: Sheep Cairn, Eastern Montana and fresh forage, collected from gardens to provide forage for our animals. Just like our farmer friends in the hills of Western Java who drive up into the hills on motorbikes and then hike to cut animal forage, we harvested from our own garden and gathered the leavings from other neighborhood gardens as well to provide food for our animals. For anyone interested in reading an adventure story and hearing what happened the last time these animals broke out of the fence, we recorded our tale a summer newsletter. The full version, which we're told makes a great bedtime story is here.

Our sheep, short on pasture - and ready for their next move - snack on a large bundle of brussel sprout leaves past their prime.

This week our featured meal is the one we shared on a neighbor's table on Sunday. We had joined friends and neighbors at Turner Family Farms for a special annual workday: the fall hog butchering. They raise a few pigs each year on their small farm, including their boys' 4-H hogs and a handful of others that are sold directly to neighboring families who agree, as part of their ownership of the animal, to help with the processing.

We'll tread gently, in this space, on the topic of raising animals for consumption. We know how personal the decision to eat meat is, and that for some people it is simply unnacceptable. We, after various periods of not eating meat, have now chosen to incorporate animals into our diet as mindfully as possible, including being a part of the entire process. For us, one of the outcomes of a committment to knowing the full story of our food has been that we eat meat very sparingly.

We are not quite as insistent as that couple parodied in the Portlandia sketch, who must request every detail of the chicken they order. But we do take some good-natured ribbing from family sometimes for our "where did it some from?" questions, and we do take the vegetarian or wild-fish option most often when eating out. Of course, we're not complete purists: we've succumbed to the pancetta-topped pizza at our favorite place without obtaining a full pedigree, more than once. And sometimes as a guest, it's best to simply eat gratefully and not ask too many questions.

So, at events like potlucks we are usually pretty wary of the options. But when we broke for lunch at the Turner's, it was an interesting and different experience to be at a potluck where each contribution came from a family willing to engage so directly with their food as to help in the butchering process. And so we were suddenly faced with a surprising array of choices: slow-cooked barbequed chicken grown right there, home-smoked pork, and wild game chili with a squash and bean base.

On the table, at a different table this week: the potluck feast on harvest day at Turner Farms.

I have a theory that when people really understand and engage with what it took to produce meat, it tends to be used more sparingly: smaller amounts can feel denser, more nutritious. It doesn't have to be in a huge slab or the main event of a meal. And so, of course, the other featured foods were just as exciting and filled out most of the plate: cabbage slaw, kale and spinach salads, dollops of roasted winter squash, baked brie with huckleberry jam, and the just-unveiled sauerkraut the Turners make each year in a stone crock over 100 years old (the secret, they claim, to their successful and delicious saurkraut each year).

It was a solid day of work, but felt like part of a long tradition, too. We cut and packaged up seven animals to be used throughout the year by about ten families. We ourselves brought home one-half of a hog, and are venturing into our first experience home-curing bacon. It's meat that will be a benefit to our cold-climate winter diet, gifts for family at the holidays, and sourced in a way that we can feel good about. It doesn't mean it's easy, but at least we are part of the whole process, all the way from the field to the table.

Harvest day is all hands on deck, regardless of age. Several of us were brand new to this work this year, but Gus, in the lower right, is and old pro and called the shots in the packing room for much of the day.

Our good hot compost, the most imporant tool in our food-growing strategies, is endagered by the current version of the Food Safety Modernization Act.

When I sat down to write today’s blog I fully intended to share something more charming than government rules and regulations. Something more cuddly and appealing, like a writhing ball of red wriggler worms in the compost. To be honest, I’d rather shovel the foot-deep layers of bedding and manure out of the winter chicken barn than dig into the new rules and regulations proposed in the Food Safety Modernization Act.

But the truth is, as we have visited with farmers around the region this fall, this act has come up over and over again as a frightening danger to small farm operations, especially those following organic practices and innovative integrated systems of both growing and marketing. Lately it’s been coming up on local papers and social media, with pleas to make comments before the November 15th deadline. It’s become both impossible and irresponsible for me to continue to ignore it, so I spent some time today sifting through links, trying to understand, and finally making my official public comments.

And it’s a good thing I did, because if we don’t pay attention and take some action these regulations have the potential to limit even my ability to shovel out the layers in that winter chicken coop and turn them into a productive soil amendment--or at least the ability to sell or market anything that we grew with that rich, organic fertilizer that required no manufacturing or transport beyond a shovel and the garden cart (talk about low carbon footprint!).

I am grateful for people who take naturally to government, policy, and committees--people like my father who, after two decades of serving on his local school board, can parse through pages of mandates and regulations as easily as he runs a harrow through his fields. For the rest of us, it’s easy to get lost and even to give up before taking any action. I’m writing today to urge you to take at least some action on this, even if you can’t dig through every detail. Though I am no expert, I’ve tried my best to distill down just a few of the core issues that could affect us and the successful diversified small farmers we admire and hope to emulate.

Regulations on the use of manure and compost. Building healthy soil is the most important thing a grower does, and our main tools for that are the billions of microbes and soil fauna that work in our compost piles and fields. The proposed regulations make it very difficult to use this critically important soil amendment (already regulated under the regulations for organic practices) without either sterilization by chemical or physical means, or a lengthy waiting period between applying it and harvesting from the field it was applied to.

Prohibitive costs to regulations, regardless of scale. Many of the requirements of the Produce Rule (including overly strict requirements for weekly testing of any surface water used for irrigation) are estimated by the FDA as averaging $4,697 per year for “very small farm” ($25,000-$250,000 in annual sales). Much of this has to do with small farms, which present a much lower risk, being required to go through the same proceedures and regulations as much larger operations.

Limitations to innovative and diverse marketing strategies. especially direct-to-consumer marketing. The current rules do not clearly distinguish when a farm becomes a “facility” subject to a suite of additional regulations and costs that really are not necessary or appropriate for a farm stand, farmer’s market booth, or a multi-farm CSA.

It's not that our national food system doesn't need some drastic improvements to ensure food safety (recent outbreaks of various food-borne pathogens make that clear). It's just that the current set of rules places an undue burden onto the smaller farms, drastically out of proportion to the risk that they pose, compared to larger operations. That problem can be fixed, with your input, so small farms can continue to operate and be accountable directly to their customers, while larger operations comply with improved regulations.

These regulations apply most directly to the farms and farmers, of course, but remember that even if you are on the buying or eating end, this affects you, too. If you value access to fresh, carefully grown produce or farm products, if you find yourself inspired by farm-to-school programs bringing fresh veggies into elementary schools, or if you like picking up a box of produce directly from the people who grew it, you need to chime in with comments. It might not be as fun as picking out your favorite vegetables at the market, but this kind of action is critical to your ability to do that next summer. Please join us in taking some action by learning about the issues, making your comments, and spreading the word.

Note: The links above include some tips and suggestions on effective comments, but require several clicks and a little patience to get to the actual comments page. If you're already informed and savvy, and ready to make comments directly, you can jump straight to the government pages in the links here and here.

This photograph was taken while spear fishing with Bong, the man in the photograph. As he was teaching me to fish, a storm swept in (see the storm clouds that we ignored). Clutching my camera and the boat, we swam into the protection of the mangroves in the background. This was long before I started using dry bags and silica gel. The black and white negative for this image was developed when I still just used one type of film—Kodak Plus X. Back then (2000), I developed my film in a portable changing bag and let my negatives dry in a small, single-man tent. A version of this image and my accompanying essay appears in the book, How Americans Do Their Business Abroad.

Years ago, back when I was a Peace Corps Volunteer in the Philippines, I served on the small island of Sibuyan, in the middle of the Philippine Sea. My days, wherever I worked in the Philippines, seemed to consist of one-half water, one-half rainforest. With more than 7100 islands, it's no wonder that ninety percent of the population live in close proximity to the coast. My best friends were always part farmer, part fishermen. Like diversified farmers everywhere, many farmers I knew relied on the shipping industry, or had a friend or relative that helped get some of their produce to a market on another island.

Panay Island, Philippines. Rainforest farms are just a few miles from the coast.

In an essay I wrote for my first website, and then later published, I wrote about what it felt like to just make it through a storm with one of my forest-fishermen friends. Years later, I traveled back to both the Visayas for my master's reserach on forest farmers, and then to the island of Southern Mindanao where I worked with smallholder banana farmers as part of progressive land reform policies that enabled them to aquire some of their own farmland to grow both bananas and other food on.

As the a storm approaches, smallholder's children play on a pile of banana stalks discarded from a recent banana harvest.

Like farmers who acquire land for the first time everywhere, starting out can be rough going. I found in the Philippines in 2004 that the first and second generation farmers needed a lot of help with their management and practices. Those who had been farming longer, who had gained much of their knowledge from past generations of farmers, were often the ones at the cutting edge, who had the most diversified farms, who had developed rotation schemes of farming within the forests they returned to 20, 30 and 40 years later. This was not the slash and burn agriculture that we so often witness for palm oil plantations, but it was another type of agriculture altogether: one that involved working within the constraints of different types of forests, building soil over generations, and replanting the forests. This is what inspired me. This is what inspires some of my Philippine farmer friends as well - I can count many farmers who are proud to be, all at the same time: upland rice, coconut, banana, and ginger farmers. It's searching out these complex farmer-systems out that keeps me writing, photographing and filming today.

A coconut farmer dries freshly harvested coconuts so the dried meat can be packed out of the forest and re-sold to a buyer that will process coconut oil.

Often while I collected this information, I'd be working in the hard weather of storms, or holed up with farmers, sometimes in a bamboo hut in the middle of the forest, sometimes in a concrete house near the coast.

Upland forest farmer, Philippines.

Over the past days, as I worked with our farm animals, the irony was not lost upon me that many farm animals in the southern Philippines were not faring well. Small farmers I've worked with in the Philippines have close relationships to many of their goats, pigs or cattle - as a key part to their food secrutiy.

When the latest typhoon struck, again in the Philippines, it took a bite out of everyone's safety and security there, and especially those who are responsible for producing food. Scanning through the images on the internet today, I spent time first with the images of the typhoon damage from this storm. But then, in looking over several collections of images rated as most impactful from around the world in my lifetime, I'm struck by how many of those images, especially in recent times, are of flooding, damage caused by weather, extreme climate and food insecurity. This irony was not lost upon the current series of climate talks in Warsaw. Hopefully it will not be lost upon the rest of us.

Campfire smoke and condensation from a river mix with a forest canopy that includes native trees, coconuts, and the pandanus tree, used for baskets and mats. The fruits are consumed by wild pigs and monkeys. In the right portion of the image, the edge of the lowland forest, marked by coconut trees, merges with the primary forest.

Editors Note: A more entertainting account of making it through a typhoon, and living to tell about it, is here.

Last year, at this time, I journeyed to the mountains of China. After days working my way to Yunnan province, working with tea farmers, I decided to journey to a more remote area, less accessible, where traditional agriculture was older. Ironically, much farther from a road network in hills in the mountain shadows of Jade Dragon and Haba Snow Mountain , I found farmers working organically along an old trade route, known as the Tea Horse Road. This old trade route, that links Tibet with China, helped the region trade their prized tea with equally prized Tibetan horses, ridden by warriors. Foot and horse traffic is still the only way to navigate portions of this trade route, and I stayed with Tibetan families for some days, drinking tea at night, and capturing the agriculture landscape by day. The images are not dissimilar from traditional agricultural activities in our own mountain shadows where we farm in our valley.

Plateaus and terraces create growing climate for farmers within the shadow of these mountains along the border of Tibet and China.

Pasture land is limited, but goats dot hillsides and slopes, foraging on native grasses, carefully managed by herders.

In a canyon shadow, a fruit tree provides shade, food, and nitrogen for a nearby family.

Many of the families along this trade route are Tibetan. Flags are part of the landscape, marking homesteads, waypoints and temples.

In a narrow canyon, a shadow outlines a herder who collects native seeds that will help revegetate part of his family land.

Hierloom corn dries within the help of the sun and wind on a rooftop.

The wheat harvest is tied, bunched up, and dries - preparing for hand threshing, in a few weeks.

A layer of nitrogen fixing fruit trees and mulch from the harvest helps build soil along the slopes of these mountain pathways.

Families collect mulch, to build soil and hold moisture, just like farmers all over the world.

Horses, some of Tibetan origin, graze along the contours of a freshly harvested field. Harvesting is done by hand and with small, walking tractors.

A goat, for meat, wanders alongside a steep part of the trail, as dusk begins to settle.

One a family's squash store rests in a small room inside a family compound.

Grasses that stabilize slopes and serve as fodder for livestock, also provide thatching for houses.

In another valley, far below this trail, large mono-crops, like this large rice field, provide large amounts of food, but come at a high cost of chemical inputs. The fate of sustainable agriculture in China hangs in the balance.

As part of this project, I went on assignment for the Rainforest Alliance to make a film about the people who grow the tea that traveled this tea trade route.

We had some special company for dinner "on the table" this week: Pat and Sharon are excellent growers who have established successful gardens literally around the world: at a Peace Corps assignment in Southern Africa; both the wet and dry sides of Oregon; deep soils of the Bitterroot Valley to their current impressive garden in the Ninemile Valley of Montana, where they have experienced a frost in every month of the year. All that garden starting means they are experts at building soils and building fences. They are the ones we called when stymied by how to stretch 400-pound roll of 8-foot fence.

And what do you serve when some of your gardening mentors come for dinner? Homegrown, of course. In the whole meal, the only things we did not grow right here were: salt, pepper (collected by Noah on assingment in Sri Lanka), olive oil, butter (from Lifeline Dairy down the road), and wheat flour (grown in Montana but not by us), and some wine (we're working on that).

The spread:

Pasture raised lamb, roasted on a bed of potatoes, carrots, and onions, topped with rosemary, garlic, and red wine sauce.

Kale picked moments before dinner from the bed of covered greens, sautéed and topped with toasted walnuts and pears. It has turned extra sweet from the recent hard frosts.

Sourdough rolls, from a starter originating from our friends at Quail Springs.

And of course, because the Sweenys are the sort who show up with work gloves, sun hats, and two pairs of fencing pliers when asked to stop by and give us some fencing advice.....well, they brought dessert. For us, it was the first pumpkin pie of the season, delicious, and it introduced us to a new plant to love: the "Winter Luxury" pumpkin. They say it is the very best pumpkin for pies. We'll be putting that in the garden notes to order for next year's growing. In the meantime, we're grateful for the luxury of warm evenings with good friends and food.

Our neighbor, Greg, directs an entourage as they pile their leaves into our main growing space.

Missoula is a funny place, sometimes. We live in a zone where it's illegal to install a woodburning stove, but backyard burning is allowed most of the year. This weekend as we sipped our Saturday morning coffee and planned out our day, the view from our barnboard table included an alarming plume of smoke from one of the neighbor's properties. At first, after peering around trees just enough to confirm that there was not in fact any house-fire happening over there, we decided it must just be a tough, smoky start to a burn pile, and settled back to our coffee hoping it would clear out soon.

As the smoke continued though, we could make out figures of various sizes moving through the growing haze with rakes, and it became clear that this was not just a matter of lighting a stubborn brush pile--they were burning a substantial crop of wet fall leaves. We debated what to do. We love meeting and talking with neighbors, but we really try to avoid telling them what to do. At the same time, we were watching a steady stream of smoke billow out towards all these houses.

Noah decided to brave the potential of seeming too pushy, and approach the neighbors with the offer of taking the leaves off their hands. Because, you see, for us a pile of fall leaves is not so much a disposal problem as it is a resource. We go to great lengths to gather them up.

Last fall we made regular trips through town with the farm pickup, gathering load after load of leaves from people setting them out for trash pickup in the city. Driving by one place when the truck was already full, Noah leaned out the window and called out to the neighbor stuffing bags "We'll be back for those!" One day, coming home on errands, I stuffed 6 full trash bags of leaves into our VW Jetta. We mulched fruit trees, garden beds, garden paths with them. We stockpiled bags and used them as chicken bedding all winter. They are a valuable source of carbon for our many compost bins.

Thankfully, the family across the field appreciated our offer of a less-smoky way to dispose of their leaves: we'd take them all. We left a pickup truck and trailer with them, which they loaded with filled bags, but it was with the loose leaves that the real parade started. The families involved live just a few hundred yards away by cross-pasture, ditch-jumping shortcut but a solid mile away by roads (very slow, rural-neighborhood roads). They hooked up a nice little lift-bed trailer to their car, stuffed it with full tarps of leaves, and topped it with a few of the kids who were helping. They were a little shy at first, but by the fourth trip, it was a veritable parade vehicle, and on arriving they were leaping in leaves, collecting eggs, and feeding the chickens.

Of course, a farm visit would not be complete without at least one visit to our chickens.

It worked out for everyone--a little easier to breathe the neighborhood air, a freshly collected egg sent home with each kid, and for us: a deep and satisfying supply of leaves for the garden. Another good neighboring, where a quick walk over and short conversation was all it took to turn some problems and tasks into solutions for all of us.

One of the neighborhood kids, who also goes by "Prince Angelo" takes a break from his work bringing us farm inputs to celebrate.

In all too familiar territory lately the writing of this post begins late at night, 10 pm on the road. We are on our way back from a long day. We are grateful it ended with a visit to a friend and fellow farmer, where we shared an improvised home-grown dinner in the tipi where she lives three seasons of the year on her farm. We spent a good long evening stoking the woodstove, laughing, and commiserating on the complications, tough decisions, and inherent uncertainties of farming. We traded the stories of how it was that each of us came to know that growing food was some important part of us, something worth the sacrifices of time, income and, often, comfort.

We have learned much of this--what we are willing to do for this goal, and how it has expanded beyond just wanting to grow food for ourselves--over this past year. We have only begun to write about it, and we know our first writings, with forbodings of the possibility of losing it all, left many of you curious or confused of exactly what the situation was. It's not been our intention to hide the process or the status--honestly, for a long time we weren't sure, ourselves, what was happening and if we would get to stay here on this place we threw ourselves into so wholly over the past year.

We kept quiet in this space partly because so much was uncertain, and in part out of wanting to respect and preserve the privacy of the process with our friend the landowner we have been working with this past year. We held out hope, struggling and stretching to find any sort of solution that would work for all of us and let us keep growing and living on this space we'd fallen in love with. Sadly, despite so much searching for solutions, the simple truth is, we can't stay here.

In some ways it's been like a tough break-up. You know, one where you know for quite some time that things aren't really going to work out, but the reality of moving on is just too much to take. We've run several laps through all the textbook stages of grief.

The reasons are complicated. Many of them echo some that are regional, national, or even global: available agriculture land is shrinking, especially near population centers. Remaining land is priced for the growth of houses rather than food. Other reasons are unique to our neighborhood and location: zoning and building restrictions that meant no feasible way to live on the property we farmed. Others are purely personal. Our vision of a farm scaled to provide some income, one that integrated animals into fruit and vegetable growing systems, simply did not fit with the landowner's vision.

We'll continue to write about our time here in this place: our progress, our learnings--both record crops and failures--even as we look out onto very uncertain horizons to search for what comes next. There are still so many stories from this space and this time, even as we search for the next stage.

It's a time to consider everything, all kinds of creative business and livelihood options, all kinds of geography. We do hope to be able to stay in this region where we have some good community and are surrounded by a landscape that inspires us. But it may not be easy to do. None of it is a simple decision though, or a light one.

People keep asking what type of farm it is we want, and what we are looking for. In some ways it's simple; in other ways it changes with the place itself. We built our goals and plans out from this space here--a diversified vegetable farm with 15-20 families from the immediate neighborhood purchasing seasonal farm shares, picking up their produce weekly on an evening sweetened by the offer of homemade pizza baked in a wood-fired earth oven. Small-scale direct sales of eggs and meat animals. The gradual establishment of a you-pick berry patch, bikeable distance from town.

This vision may or may not fit the next place we find ourselves, and we know we'll have to adapt. We'll have to re-establish ourselves, and have to be creative. We know we'll need to find a way to connect the people to their food and the land that supports it. And, most basic, we'll have to build up soil, again, somewhere now.

Before joining that friend in her tipi this evening, we'd spent most of the day searching for a place. We toured properties in the region with a realtor who gradually began to understand that no matter how cold it was, we were going to get out, walk the field, and kick up soil, rub it carefully between our fingers, examine the vegetation, take a deep breath of cold air, and search for anything that will help anchor us in this hard, wide open search.

We've entered deep fall here; the first thick snowflakes fell on us on our way home from town this evening. Lately we've been noitcing our neighbors barns and haylofts fill with winter feed. So far we have just a few animals and no need for a full barn of hay, but we feel that same urge to secure our resources, shelter in, and tighten things up for winter. Today's image was made in this same gathering-in time of year, a while ago. Noah's story of finding and photographing the barn along the Blackfoot River:

Haybarns get full. They become emptied easily. The couple that maintain this barn keeps patching one board on top of another; solidifying the structure between cycles of filling and emptying. They think it is the most ugly structure on the river; especially because early hay often means no alfalfa. I had to wait almost a damn year to take this photograph. I was waiting for the couple. The growing season. The light. The seasons helped with the weathering and the building. They taught patience. When everything was right, I clambered over the barb wire with my husky sneezing from the invasive knapweed. She chews knapweed, like a cow, and sneezes a lot from all the chewing. I pivoted on the fence. Horses shyly charged and retreated. Hearing the river, I remembered a wolf I saw loping along the Blackfoot one winter evening when the snow reached the car doors. Wind carried radio static from the dusty Subaru. More hay traveled down the road, probably towards Missoula. Logs moved down the mountain to get ahead of the fires. I didn't think anyone saw me, but in one of the passing trucks, there was one hand that passed, hanging in the air. The sky changed color. The light began changing. I tripped the shutter; I hung on to the fence; I wiped something out of my eye from the buildup of all these seasons and brushed the ground.

This Friday, we join Amanda Soule in the tradition of {this moment}. As she describes it: "A Friday ritual. A single photo - no words - capturing a moment from the week. A simple, special, extraordinary moment. A moment I want to pause, savor and remember. If you're inspired to do the same, leave a link to your 'moment' in the comments for all to find and see."

Why we write. On our home farm, we see connections between what we do and the farmers and people we work with around the world. We share these adventures here to invite you into the learning and community, regardless of where you are located.